“Better, smarter, faster.”

“Give, teach, enable.”

“Just say yes.”

“Say yes differently.”

Each of these phrases guided City Harvest’s work at different times of my 11 year tenure as Executive Director.  Each pithy phrase naturally grew out of strategic and operational planning by leadership looking to focus our work for maximum impact on our mission of reducing hunger in New York City.  They focused our work during specific periods of time, and on specific business challenges. They worked because they were:

• Short, so were easy to remember.
• Focused, so reminded leadership of our core approach.

Because the phrases were short and focused, they were easily transmitted throughout the organization and both understood and adopted by all staff.

“Better, smarter, faster” was the informal slogan of our first strategic plan. The phrase encapsulated our goals – to do our work better, to work smarter, and be faster in accomplishing our work.  We had confidence that together we could reach these goals.  And we did!

“Give, teach, enable” emerged from our second strategic plan.  It summarized our approach to ending hunger in NYC:  give people good, healthy food to eat; teach people how to use unfamiliar food items; and enable people to access the resources they need and are entitled to to get enough food to eat (e.g. food stamps, Earned Income Tax Credits).  In many ways, this motto continues to guide City Harvest’s work to this day.

“Just say yes” was the solution to a business challenge that emerged very quickly after I became Executive Director.  Prior management decided to refuse certain food donations, especially bread-only donations and those of less than 20 pounds.  The analysis was that these food products were not needed, and it was not cost-effective to dispatch trucks for such small amounts of food.

The backlash from donors was dramatic.  While they sort of understood the business case, most felt that there was so much hunger in NYC that every donation should be valued.  Some of these food donors were chefs at the city’s top restaurants, and bad word-of-mouth from them could hurt City Harvest down the road.  So we instituted a “just say yes” policy.

We extended this policy to people who had fundraising ideas that perhaps wouldn’t raise a lot of money yet would require a fair amount of staff time.  We realized that if we said “yes!” people felt welcomed and valued.  Then we could discuss with them the best way to get the work done.

“Just say yes, differently” was a natural extension of saying “yes” and became the engine for innovation.  If we were to say “yes” to people who wanted to join the City Harvest family, we had to figure out how to do it in the smartest way.  Middle managers pushed this approach because they were the ones who had to juggle limited resources.  We leaders heard them and supported this revised approach because it just made sense.

The spirit of innovation fostered the development of the Street Fleet program, involving volunteers in picking up and delivering food donations of under 20 pounds.  For fundraising, we created guidelines for working with people who wanted to raise funds for us, to make it easy for them to help City Harvest while respecting our brand and the ROI from using our staff.  We began to generate thousands of dollars from small events.

And our spirit of “yes” sparked other innovation.  A Board member came up with a program called Skip Lunch, Fight Hunger, and ran it with little staff support.  As that program grew and raised more money, more staff support was needed and given.

These short phrases expressed City Harvest’s approach, values, and culture, providing guidance for the organization’s program development and community building through fundraising and volunteer work.  Most great tag lines provide some of the same guidance.  Ours were informal, not the core tag line, and their very informality was part of their strength in uniting leadership, middle management, drivers, the office team, and interns to head in the same direction.

Every organization can use and benefit from such uniting phrases, especially those that bubble up out of planning and teamwork.